In conventional industrial automation systems, alarm messages are used as important means for protecting against consequential damage, for monitoring the deviation from healthy operation of machines and systems, and for guiding maintenance activities. Alarms can be triggered on all levels of an automation system or machine data acquisition and supervision system from field devices up to the supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) and manufacturing execution systems (MES) level, or even backend level (e.g., through cloud analytics). However, alarm systems are common at the field level, which is where operation and control decisions are taken, and also where the context of operation and measurement and high resolution sensor data are readily available.
Alarms are typically manually defined or programmed by the integrators or operators of a component/device/machine/system. They could be generated automatically by analytics, for example, when a value is above threshold or in response to more advanced triggers (e.g., abnormality is detected when comparing a historical signature of the data with new incoming data). Alarms and additional symptoms in abnormal sensor data or operation of the machine are assumed precursors for failures. Failures can become causes for more significant failures.
A single failure often has implication on many different subsystems, components, and processes. Therefore in a large-scale infrastructure or complex system (e.g., an industrial automation line, a bogie, a turbine, a transformer, etc.), one problem might cause tens or even hundreds of subsequent different alarms distributed across the infrastructure, which further may point in a large variety of directions. At the other end, a cause may stay hidden for a long time and result in expensive consequential damage measured in downtime, repair costs, etc. For operators and maintenance personnel, it can be very cumbersome, time consuming, and difficult to determine which alarms are critical, diagnose causes of apparent disoperation, what is causing what, which alarm is the root cause.